The Problem with Police-Recorded Video

ABSTRACT

Judges and jurists frequently read police-recorded video as arhetorical. It is not. Footage recorded from the perspective of an officer favors police. Drawing on both Burke’s theory of identification and film studies, I consider how footage filmed from an officer’s perspective functions as a nonverbal constitutive rhetoric. In an analysis of Harris v. Scott (2007), I demonstrate how police-recorded video encourages viewers to dissolve the space between themselves and the police, inviting audiences to characterize both police and themselves as passive, impartial, and objective viewers of an recorded event. When successful as constitutive rhetoric, footage from police-recorded video makes jurors and judges more suspectable to arguments that characterize police as passive observers in an event.

KEYWORDS:

• Black Lives Matter
• identification
• policing
• visual rhetoric
• whiteness

Acknowledgement

I sincerely appreciate Dr. Donnie Sackey and Dr. Noble Frank's feedback during the revision process. I would also like to thank Chris Kaiser for his expertise in the development of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Take, for instance, the case of Armand Bennet, an unarmed Black man shot in the head during a traffic stop just two days after the murder of Michael Brown. The shooter, New Orleans Police Officer Lisa Lewis, was wearing a body camera at the time of the shooting, but no footage of the shooting was ever found. Lewis and her partner had reportedly turned off their cameras in anticipation of the end of their shifts (the shooting took place 45 minutes before the pair were set to clock out). Despite deliberately turning off their body cameras while on-shift (and later, failing to report the shooting), both officers kept their jobs.

² This essay concerns two types of technologies: dashboard cameras and body-worn cameras, both of which record an event from an officer’s perspective. For this reason, I do not consider dashboard camera footage that includes the officer, such as footage that may show an officer walking to a driver’s window; I am focusing specifically on the effect of viewing an event from the officer’s perspective.

³ The Supreme Court’s ruling on Harris v. Scott involves the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable seizure. There is no federal policy governing police-recorded video. Policies involving police-recorded video vary among states and municipalities. For information about policies governing police-recorded video see The National Conference of State Legislatures’ Body-Worn Camera Laws Database and the Brennan Center’s Police Body Camera Policies: Privacy and First Amendment Protections.

⁴ Gruber also draws on Diane Davis, in reading Freud across Burke, notes that identification does not assume the traditional mind/body dichotomy. As Davis describes process of identification: “the same mirror neurons fire in my brain whether I actually grab a pencil myself or I see you grab one, indicating no capacity to distinguish between my grasping hand and what is typically (and hastily) described as a visual representation of it: your grasping hands” (131). There is perhaps a path to our destination via psychoanalytic theory (see Fanon 90–95 and Kelly). For the sake of scope and clarity, I am not taking it here. It is enough, for the scope of this essay, to consider how adopting another’s gaze through a camera lens initiates a persuasive process, one that fosters an identification between the officer and the viewer of the footage through similarity. As such, the construction of whiteness may occur implicitly through storytelling techniques.

⁵ Researchers find a shared belief in the innate capacity to access Truth mobilizes white supremacy in online communities (Rousis et al., ”The Truth Is Out There”). For example, Samantha Kutner describes the phenomena of “redpilling” as a foundational step in white supremacist communities. Thus, tapping into a shared sense of personally felt specialness, a shared understanding of one’s ability to see the world more clearly than others, is the first step of a process that places individually felt victimization into a conspiratorial, racist narrative.

⁶ “Two Fold arguments concerning the good and the bad” (Sprague 155).

⁷ For an example, consider the court’s discussion around a specific part of the tape, wherein Harris pulls into a parking lot to turn around. This part of the tape, according to Scalia, is the piece that proves that Harris was a danger to pedestrians. The moment when Harris turns around in an empty parking lot is a major point of contention in oral argument, serving as the point in which judges determine that Scott’s driving was reckless enough to justify the use of deadly force. To this end, the judges rely entirely on what is shown on tape: a car chase in the parking lot of a shopping center. It is here that judges fill in gaps about the implication of such an event: a car attempting to evade officers, driving over the limit, in a pedestrian space. In doing so, the judges (save Justice Stevens) fail to access material circumstances unavailable to the viewer. Namely, they fail to consider that the parking lot was empty; the event occurred late at night, long after the shops were closed. However, because it was dark out, the lack of footage showing the absence of pedestrians provides a space for judges to fill in the gaps.

⁸ Scott justifies escalating the chase by declaring that one must “assume” that Harris’s decision to evade police was motivated by a serious crime like “armed robbery,” and not something trivial like “unpaid tickets” (Christie/Victor, 00:21:44 – 00:22:01). But, of course, Harris was indeed motivated to flee because of a warrant over unpaid tickets.

⁹ That Burke’s work helps us make sense of visual artifacts is no surprise given that, as Debra Hawhee and Megan Poole posit in their examination of Burke’s engagement with war photography, the “placement of photographs and their material means of display nudged Burke” in a more ”critical direction” (433).